For our staff, this means a workplace that is supportive and welcoming, respects and recognizes their achievements and contributions, and provides meaningful opportunities for professional development. As with our faculty, it means that we should expect our staff to strive for excellence in their numerous contributions to our endeavors.
And for our students, this means unparalleled opportunities for intellectual growth and achievement.
We have made great strides in strengthening our undergraduate and graduate student experience. To this end, we must strive to provide an even fuller and richer academic and extra-curricular experience that is commensurate with our commitment to providing them with the opportunity to reach their full promise.
We must also have an admissions and financial aid program that ensures that student participation in our community is governed by the ideals of merit and not by the accident of privilege.
Under the inspired leadership of President Emeritus Brody, we broke new ground with the Baltimore Scholars Program, which provides full-tuition scholarships to undergraduate students from the Baltimore City school system. But as hard as we have worked, there is still much more for us all to do before we can be confident that the promise of equal opportunity for students of equal merit is fully realized in our university.
In the near future, I hope to be able to honor the ideals that lie at the heart of our university by declaring that Johns Hopkins will join the pantheon of great universities whose undergraduate programs are need-blind, not need-aware.
And to complete our commitment, we need to go further, doubling and redoubling our efforts for financial aid support for our graduate and professional students across the university.
Johns Hopkins has been built on a foundation of great schools. Our decentralized system of governance rightly encourages each of our schools to pursue academic priorities that are tailored to local needs and interests. This has served us well. Without the dynamism and creativity that decentralization affords, I doubt that our university would have accomplished a fraction of what it has.
But while acknowledging this record of sterling achievement, there is no denying that our identity as a university, as one university, has not received the same encouragement and succor. The sum of our university must be greater than its constituent parts. We must knit together a university identity, a shared vision of Johns Hopkins, that both draws upon and enriches the identity of each of our schools, the health system and the Applied Physics Laboratory.
